Abkhazian rebels in September 1993. The 

 Georgian Republic thus has only one small 

 port left — Batumi. 



Besides the internal problems 

 associated with the civil war, Georgia's 

 fishing industry is faced with two additional 

 problems; fuel supplies and access to high- 

 seas fishing grounds located within 200 

 miles of coastal countries. The Georgian 

 Republic has no oil or other domestic 

 energy sources apart from hydroelectric 

 power. In the past, inexpensive diesel oil 

 was available from Soviet sources, but this 

 situation has changed radically in the last 2 

 years. When the Soviet Union was 

 dissolved in December 1991, Georgia 

 elected not to join the Commonwealth of 

 Independent States and is thus technically a 

 "foreign country" for Russia. As a result, it 

 has to pay world prices for Russian diesel 

 oil. Whether or not its Soviet-built vessels, 

 known as high consumers of diesel oil, can 

 be operated profitably under the 

 circumstances, is doubtful. If one adds the 

 fees which have to be paid by high-seas 

 fishermen for access to the coastal grounds 

 of other countries, the bottom line becomes 

 a deficit. It can not be expected that the 

 Georgian state, drained of monetary 

 resources and facing a precipitous decline 

 in its gross national product, will be capable 

 of extending any subsidies to the fishing 

 industry in the foreseeable future. 



On October 8, 1993, the Government 

 of Eduard Shevardnadze joined the 

 Commonwealth. What significance this step 

 will have for the future of the high-seas 

 fleet is impossible to predict at this time. 



SOURCES 



Baseinovoe Proizvodstvennoe Ob'edinenie 

 Yugryba. Sevastopol, 1991. 



U.S. Navy, Office of Naval Intelligence, 29 

 July 1993. 



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